Amazon expands customer-to-customer sales to 3 more cities in India

Amazon's local finds which is now in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, allows individuals to register as sellers on the marketplace to sell used items to others in the city.Payal Ganguly | ET Bureau | Updated: August 07, 2017, 14:07 IST

Online marketplace Amazon India, which had introduced customer-to-customer sales in January, has expanded the service to three additional cities apart from Bengaluru.

The Local Finds service, which is now also in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, allows individuals to register as sellers on the marketplace to sell used items to others in the city.

The discovery and C2C sale platform, which launched with books, has also gained traction with local sellers and boutiques selling handloom and handicraft products and accessories, said Mahendra Nerurkar, director of new initiatives at Amazon India.

"The Local Finds section has so far seen 30,000 people selling successfully and at any given time, the platform has 15,000 to 20,000 live listings for a city like Bengaluru. Sell as an individual is a global programme and we have made some India specific tweaks to this," said Nerurkar.

He added that one of the specific changes made as part of the programme was to provide fullstack of services including packaging, shipping, doorstep inspection for the buyer, among others, to address the need for optimum logistics partners.

The second change being restricting the search results to within the city for ease of delivery. ET had reported the development when the pilot was launched in Bengaluru in January. The platform sees a large number of academic books being sold on it, followed by video games, music vinyl records and movies.

"We have ensured that the seller posts picture of the product because of which we have not seen an extraordinary rate of return," added Nerurkar.